Speaker
Description
Gravitational form factors (GFFs) offer profound insights into the spatial distribution of the strong force within hadrons and are intimately linked to the trace anomaly -- a key feature of QCD that underpins the proton’s finite mass and the pion’s near-zero mass. These fundamental observables will be accessible with high precision in upcoming electron-ion collider experiments. On the theoretical front, holographic QCD provides a powerful semiclassical framework for modeling hadron structure, offering intuitive and physically compelling descriptions. However, extracting the GFF D-term -- crucial for understanding mechanical properties such as internal pressure and shear forces -- has remained a persistent challenge in holographic approaches. This difficulty arises because the gravitational fluctuation in five-dimensional anti-de Sitter space must satisfy transversality and tracelessness conditions.
In this talk, I present a novel approach that overcomes this limitation by exploiting the deep correspondence between light-front QCD and semiclassical gravity in a warped five-dimensional spacetime. The method leverages light-front holography, which elegantly bridges the perturbative regime at large momentum transfers ($Q^2$) with the nonperturbative domain at low $Q^2$, where interactions with scalar and tensor glueballs dominate. As concrete applications, we compute the gravitational form factors of both the pion and the nucleon, and compare our results with recent lattice QCD simulations, demonstrating promising agreement.
